Gretchen Schafft’s painstaking
research into the uses of Nazi anthropology is vital, daring and timely.Vital, in that she carefully unearths a
hidden history of science being mutilated to fit the needs of a warfare state; Daring
because her efforts quite predictably have generated resentment from those
wishing to maintain an historical silence surrounding anthropology’s complicity
in crimes against humanity; and Timely, because we live in an era where our own
scientists are increasingly pressured to comply with anti-scientific political
doctrines pressuring us to engage in rites of self-censorship by not mentioning
polar bears, evolution, and the known folly of foreign policy directives based
not on facts or truths, but on neo-con principles of faith.

The
strength of Professor Schafft’s scholarship is found in her reliance on
detailed documentation, substantiation and analysis.While other scholars have long wondered about
the roles played by various German anthropologists during the war, Gretchen
Schafft has broken the silence surrounding these complicit acts of support for
the Nazis, not by speculation and innuendo, but by the use of meticulous
readings of primary source materials that can be verified and challenged by
critics discomforted by her revelations.Given the profound implications of her work, it is natural that some
would wish to challenge her work and findings as she undermines powerful
“strategies of professional denial” (Schafft 2007:mss4), but this discomfort is
in large part a measure of the successful efforts of anthropologists to bury
our disciplinary complicity in horrific acts. There are clear parallels between the criticisms
that Professor Schafft is fielding and the criticisms anthropologists Peter T.
Suzuki or Orin Starn received two decades ago when they first published
critical historical examinations of the roles played by American
anthropologists in interning Japanese Americans in the War Relocation
Authority’s detention camps (see Opler 1987; Sady 1988; Starn 1986 ;Suzuki 1980
& 1981).New light on the dark
events of the past raises uncomfortable questions about the ways that our
present work, affiliations and knowledge are rooted in such troubling events.If we can connect elements of our own work to
such events, does this imply some sort of post-hoc complicity?

Gretchen Schafft carefully
documents how anthropometric research was adapted and used to justify Nazi
policies, and she establishes that many German anthropologists preformed their
scientific tasks without meaningfully questioning the uses of this work.Some of these anthropologists initially
rejected the demands of the Nazi state but later learned how to stifle their
objections, while reaping the rewards of compliance, and the harmony of silence.

Schafft shows that while German
scientists from many disciplines worked for the Nazis before and during the
war, there was something fundamentally different about many of the Nazi
anthropologists that distinguished them from the thousands of chemists,
engineers, physicists, biologists and other scientists working for the
Nazis.While these other scientists
contributed their science to the Nazi cause in very direct ways, they did not
falsify research, concoct subjective measurements or propagate false science
for these goals.The research
measurements of Nazi medical doctors and chemists were at times unethical, but
they were reliable—that is to say, these measures could withstand the
scrutiny of repeated independent measures finding similar results; but most of
the racial measures and resulting analysis undertaken by Nazi anthropologists
were not scientific in the sense that their subjectivity and at times outright
falsification could not withstand the scrutiny of independent repeated
measures.This was a cooked-up form of
pseudo-science in which desired outcomes predicated results in ways that we are
becoming increasingly familiar in our world where scientific findings on
subjects like global warming, condoms effectiveness in reducing exposure to
HIV, the health dangers of smoking tobacco, the measurement of toxic air-born
pollutants released upon the attacks on the World Trade Center, and the
operationalization of “clean water” are filtered by political pressures that
warp scientific interpretations.

There is no such thing as
politically neutral science, and pretending otherwise will get us nowhere. The
operations of science are not judged by imagined standards of apolitical
neutrality, they are judged by theory testing operations of reliability, validity, and falsifiability. What I learn from
Gretchen Schafft’s work is that what is needed is not depoliticized science,
but science that is ethically aware of and engaged in the political context in
which it functions and is used.We need
science that resists political gerrymandering.

But the
problem with Nazi anthropology was not just that Nazi anthropologists
necessarily employed bad methods; some of their field methods for recording
elements of Roma and other minority cultures may indeed have been
“methodologically sounds” (as judged by criteria of validity, reliability
etc.).But because both means and ends
matter, Nazi anthropology was tainted with the end goals of the Nazi
program--goals that included genocide, implementing a political economy based
on racial hierarchies, and eradicating non-Germanic cultural systems. Nazi anthropology listed towards twisted ends
as anthropologists compartmentally divorced themselves from ethical concerns
about the uses of their contributions.Schafft’s research details how this was accomplished as “both a carrot
and a stick were held out to anthropologists in the Third Reich,” to produce
specific anthropological forms of use in wartime (Schafft 2004:71).

Gretchen Schafft’s work raises
serious questions not only about the political contexts determining the uses
and abuses of anthropology, but she raises important questions about anthropology’s
self-imposed historical blind-spots, and deficiencies in anthropologists’
self-conception as a discipline.

What does it mean that Josef Mengele
may well be the anthropologist with the highest name recognition in all of
history?What does it mean that most
anthropologists have no idea that Mengele was formally trained in anthropology?
But there are other questions that
strike much closer to home, such as: What does it mean that American anthropologists
have avoided examining what our disciplinary forbearers did during the war
while secretly working at the Office of War Information, the Office of
Strategic Services, the Office of Naval Intelligence, as Whitehouse advisors,
language specialists and assisting in the internment of Japanese-Americans at
the War Relocation Authority? Why is our
disciplinary history so lacking in any deep consideration of this vital past?

In my own work, I try and walk
through minefields of questions related to Professor Schafft’s work by examining
the full range of activities undertaken by American anthropologists
during the Second World War; and while the Nazi’s atrocities justified many of
the actions of American anthropologists during the war, I remain troubled by some
American anthropologists’ willingness to do things like assist the OSS’s
efforts to develop imagined Japanese-specific biological weapons that could be
used on civilians and soldiers on the Pacific front (Price 2005), the use of
anthropological knowledge to train terrorists field operatives, conduct
kidnappings, imprison Japanese-American citizens, and manipulate various native
populations for military ends (Price 2002; nd).

Broad silences also envelope
considerations of World War Two anthropologists’ activities in other
nations.Akito-ski Shimizu
is chronicling how wartime Japanese ethnographers were used to co-opt and
subdue occupied native populations throughout the Pacific (Shimizu 2003).Katsumi Nakao has critically compared the
uses of Japanese wartime anthropology with the uses of British colonialism’s
functionalist anthropology (Nakao 2004).Kyung-soo Chun is studying how Japanese ethnographers quelling
rebellions in war occupied Manchuria used Opium to curry
favor and cooperation from native informants (Chun 2004).But such critical considerations of Japanese
wartime anthropology are met with resistance and hostility in Japan
for the same reasons that Gretchen Schafft’s work is resisted by some scholars:
the anthropologists who served their nation during the war often buried traces
of their war work and went on to establish prominent mainstream academic
careers at the war’s end. Such research
troubles legacies and institutional histories.

What does it mean that so many
anthropologists from Allied and Axis nations used their professional
backgrounds for warfare?Perhaps it only
means that this is what all people find themselves doing in times of war.Perhaps these acts revealed the lurking
potential uses of an ethnographic knowledge that passively justified the
funding of such a seemingly impractical discipline.That such acts were undertaken by American
anthropologists during times of total war, or during what has become for so
many, the last “GoodWar,” comforts some, but those who find
comfort have little hope of identifying consistent means of determining when
such acts are acceptable.Perhaps the
Nazis provided all the justification that was needed for American
anthropologists, but the acceptance of such practices in one circumstance opens
the possibility that such practices can occur in any circumstance. The meanings of anthropological contributions
to modern warfare varies with individual wars, causes, and actions; but the
applications of Nazi anthropology represent an important warning of where
militarized anthropology unhinged from ethical standards has led in the past
and can lead in the future.

CONCLUSIONS

The curious thing about reactions
in opposition to Professor Schafft’s work is that German society has clearly
acknowledged its past collective guilt for the crimes of the Second World War
with monuments, reparations and public proclamations, yet there are clear
misgivings about Schafft’s later day individual assignments of guilt.

We live in an age where the past
crimes of the Nazis are acknowledged by statements of public contrition, impressive,
and moving, physical monuments.Whether
in Berlin, Jerusalem
or Auschwitz the totalizing evil of the Nazi regime is
clearly acknowledged by imposing physical structures that leave no doubt as to
the wrongs inflicted by the Nazis. But I
wonder if the ubiquitousness of such monuments sometimes serves to cement
cognitive boarders of historical memory—as if such physical acknowledgements
come to hold us back from seeing the spread of Nazi evil on a wider horizon
than any monument can contain.As James
E. Young observes in his work on After-Images of the Holocaust in
Contemporary Art, monuments can unintentionally take away the burden and
work of memories (see Young 2000:94). Schafft’s
analysis moves far past the now-comfortably accepted truths of the well known
monuments acknowledging the past crimes of Nazis, and as her work touches so
closely to people, institutions and powers whose academic legacies remain, that
discomforts are raised.

But raising such discomforts is
exactly what it means to not forget.If
we remember such horrible events without creating discord we must not be
remembering right.

Gretchen Schafft’s work goes a long
ways towards helping anthropologists to remember what most of us never knew:
Just how easily competent anthropologists were cajoled with threats and rewards
to become complicit tools for the justification of and implementation of
genocidal campaigns.

Chun, Kyung-soo. 2004. “Opium and Emperor with the Context
of Colonialism and the

War in Imperial Japan.”Paper presented at the East Asian
Anthropology and Japanese Colonialism Forum, Third Conference at SeoulNationalUniversity.
November 13, 2004.

Nakao, Katsumi. 2004. “Japanese Colony and Anthropology:
Comparison with European

Colonialism.” East Asian
Anthropology and Japanese Colonialism Forum, Third Conference at SeoulNationalUniversity.
November 13, 2004.